Impact Of Kravis Prize Recipients

To date, Kravis Prize Recipients have impacted more than 700 million people across 5 continents (Africa, North America, South America, Asia, Europe), and in more than 100 countries.

Impact of the Kravis Prize on Recipients

Read about the impact the prize has had on nonprofit leaders and changemakers from around the world.

Poverty, disease, illiteracy, violence—how can we (as educators, students, philanthropists, social innovators) work together to alleviate these persistent, devastating human conditions?

Through the generosity of Henry and Marie Joseé Kravis, the Kravis Leadership Institute, the Kravis Prize, and the integrated creativity, empathy, and courage of our academic community, the Claremont McKenna College (CMC) identity as an Ashoka U Changemaker Campus, we have a singular opportunity to make a sustainable, positive impact on these basic human conditions. It is to that profound, shared mission we are forever committed to keep our eyes on the Kravis Prize.

Winning the Kravis Prize in Leadership has been a real game changer for Helen Keller International and has helped the world learn about our transformational work. The generous cash award has allowed us to proceed with a critically needed infrastructure upgrade that will pave the way for future growth, leading to greater impact.

Moreover, the visibility and credibility engendered by this prestigious award have truly brought us to a new level, reinforcing supporters’ belief in HKI and opening many new doors for us. We received this recognition on the eve of our centennial year. The Kravis Prize has been instrumental in positioning us for this remarkable milestone and for a significant increase in the reach and impact of our work to save the sight and lives of the world’s most vulnerable and disadvantaged.

There are two things that are perhaps most important to the health and success of an NGO. First, the recognition of your work by an organization with a reputation for high standards and rigorous, comprehensive evaluation. And second, an infusion of unrestricted funding at a point in a nonprofit’s growth when it has the greatest potential to leverage pivotal change.

In 2012, the Kravis Prize did both for mothers2mothers. This extraordinary acknowledgement by Henry and Marie-Josée Kravis helped open doors to partnerships and friends that may have otherwise been inaccessible. The unrestricted dollars provided an influx of funding that helped us by the end of that year to scale the Mentor Mother model into the national healthcare systems of Kenya with the KMMP (Kenya Mentor Mothers Program) and South Africa with the SAMMP (South Africa Mentor Mother Program). Through these two initiatives alone, the Kravis Prize has played an important role in improving the health and wellbeing of thousands of mothers and babies

It takes a very unique funder to see the wisdom of providing unrestricted funding and act on it, and set up a system of reward that is not a popularity contest but is instead, a true acknowledgement of innovation, hard work, and impact. And, all the while, act with caring, commitment, and passion. You are both that kind of rare and valuable champion. We at mothers2mothers feel so blessed to be a part of the Kravis Prize family. We are humbled to be included in this extraordinary group of change-makers you assemble each year and we are incredibly grateful for the opportunity you have given us, through your generosity, to save lives and provide health and hope to so many who deserve it. Happy Anniversary, Marie-Josee and Henry Kravis, and know that you have touched the world in a way that will have impact for generations to come.

I would like to highlight three features of the Kravis Prize that I appreciate very much:

1. The Kravis Prize is personalized. It has given me the opportunity to interact directly with its leaders and other Awardees to exchange views and ideas in a very personal way. The Recipient Retreats have been wonderful opportunities.

2. Receiving the Kravis Prize has been very rewarding for me and the organization that I lead. In effect, being a Prize recipient has given us the opportunity to establish work relationships with students, the Kravis Leadership Institute , Claremont Mckenna College and Claremont Graduate School of Education for mutual benefit. We have had several fellows and interns from Claremont Mckenna College. When younger leaders become inspired, the process and impact will continue!

3. Through the Kravis Prize I have learned and become aware of the characteristics and features of transformative leadership. This has helped me to identify those features in my personal leadership style as well as to work on becoming a more effective leader.

For all of those reasons, I want to express again my gratitude and appreciation.

The Kravis Prize has been very important to me and to the Afghan Institute of Learning (AIL). First, the Kravis Prize gave AIL and me a lot more publicity and a lot more exposure, which meant that I was able to meet more donors and grantors to support AIL. Although AIL was respected, it was even more respected.

The financial award itself helped us to continue to develop our programs, especially to expand our trainings for youth and women. We were able to hold some of the conferences that we had hoped to hold and we also expanded our cultural programs. The Recipient Retreats that the Kravis Prize team have been holding for the awardees have also been very helpful for me. They have helped me with planning and being more focused on our goals and objectives and, since I share what I learn with my staff, it has helped AIL in general.

Receiving the Kravis Leadership Prize was a wonderful surprise. This recognition put a spotlight on BRAC which was not so well known in the US then. The Prize came to me at a perfect time – I used the $250,000 cash award as seed funding for new BRAC affiliates in New York and London.

They have leveraged this gift many times over. The continued inclusion of BRAC in the Stanford Social Innovation Review has been extremely helpful, further raising BRAC’s profile in the US and attracting both good students and funds.

We’re honored and grateful to receive the Kravis Prize. This is a testament to the amazing work of our board members, staff, and mentors in 22 countries who have helped thousands of entrepreneurs to think big, achieve their dreams, and pay it forward in their communities.

We’re building societies through community organizations, and diverse groups of people in the communities are coming together to overcome differences. We bring people out to talk about child protection rights, gender equality, and health issues like clean water. The program inherently has a convening power.

I remain incredibly grateful for the honour bestowed on me in 2013 as the recipient of the Kravis Prize. The prestige of winning this prize was, and continues to be, a great beneﬁ t to Right To Play, garnering the organization recognition and respect as a global leader in the non-proﬁ t sector. The wonderful financial support was also of great assistance in helping us deepen and continue our work with one million children around the world and have a real impact on their lives. Through Right To Play’s specialized sport and play programs we have seen measurable results in improving children’s knowledge about protecting themselves from disease; increased attendance at school and improved academic performance; as well as an enhanced ability to solve conﬂicts peacefully. Winning the Kravis Prize was an extremely positive boost to our work empowering and educating children and youth in disadvantaged areas. We are very proud of our association with this prize, the Kravis family and Claremont McKenna College.

INJAZ is honored to count itself a Kravis Prize winner amongst the exceptional body of fellow recipients. This prize is truly an innovative and impactful development in the field of NGO support. The award enables organizations to scale in ways that are not possible through traditional funds or grants.

Not only has the generous support enabled INJAZ to grow its operations from a regional and local country perspective, the prize has enabled INJAZ to interact with global leaders in the field of development and share invaluable best practices. In addition, the Kravis Prize, in collaboration with Claremont McKenna College, sends one student from Claremont to intern with our organization in Amman each summer. These youth have proven remarkable in their capacity to add true value to our teams in fundraising, donor stewardship and PR.

The Kravis Prize was the first ever international recognition Pratham received, which may have opened doors for subsequent awards that have been coming every year. If the prize was precious, the warmth and the support that came from the Claremont McKenna College leadership support program has been invaluable. It is good to be in a place where someone appreciates your work but it is even better to be in a place where they also say, come let us find out how you can do better.

Receiving the Kravis Prize made an enormous difference to FAWE. It significantly raised and continues to raise FAWE’s profile and visibility, especially in the West. For instance, after we received teh Prize in 2008, FAWE joined the CGI initiative and pledged to support the empowerment of women through various commitments to education.

The prize money was used to establish the FAWE endowment fund which has grown to $1.2M. FAWE has used part of the profit from this endowment fund to support its operational costs during the most difficult economic times, especially for the period 2011/12 when most funding partners cut their budget support to girls’ education. The remaining money will be re-invested into establishing a social enterprise – a state of the art technological training center to promote e-learning for its training manual on gender responsiveness in education, an incubation lab for women and girls pursuing their interest in STEM, and a resource center on girls and gender in education. Part of this building will be rented out as office space to other like-minded organizations to raise income for FAWE’s operational costs.

The Kravis Prize has had a very considerable positive impact on Landesa (formerly the Rural Development Institute), which was the inaugural awardee, and the Prize is regularly cited in our public communications, briefings and grant proposals.

Central to that impact has been the widely shared appreciation that the extreme rigor of the assessment process, used by a distinguished Kravis Prize Selection Committee, offers an exceptional degree of assurance that each of the successive awardees is indeed contributing in a notable way to the betterment of the human condition. The Prize has very effectively further elevated the issue of land rights and helped spotlight our organization’s work through the recognition it offers.

We spent more than 20 years working out of a small apartment on an annual budget of less than $2 million. In fact, for much of that time, our budget was less than $200,000. We were so accustomed to our shoestring budget—on which we still managed to achieve significant impact—that it was difficult to imagine a major step-up. But winning the Kravis Prize gave us the impetus to change course. Our credibility and profile increased, and we invested in development functions. All of this led to various sources of new funding that fueled big efforts to scale. Today, Landesa has an annual budget of about $13 million.